At the International Builder’s Show, a new model house is promoted as a green luxury abode. But its size begs to differ. The so-called New American Home embodies both extremes of American construction—ever more square footage alongside a renewed interest in energy efficiency. From Las Vegas, we weigh in on this efficient and technologically impressive, if oversized home.
The New American Home, a show house featured at this week’s International Builders’ Show in Las Vegas, seems to represent two extremes of American building impulses—lots of environmental innovation in an oversize package. The building isn’t just for gawking. It’s one of 14 similar houses for sale with price tags from $1 million to $4.5 million that include many of today’s sustainable technologies in an 8721-sq-ft spread. There is a reclaimed teak foyer table, a salvaged elm office floor, and the chaise lounge’s velvet and the countertops are made from scraps dutifully gathered from the grounds of mills and quarries. This green bling lives alongside some extravagant amenities: Flickering gas fireplaces pop up on vacant walls, the dog gets its own shower and the HDTVs are outnumbered only by the flat screen home automation panels so complex the interior designer had to learn how to turn on the lights. Handsome new LED bulbs save power—or would, if the house didn’t have so many hundreds of them. Solar panels heat hot water for the infinity pool. And damn, what a pool—complete with submerged, swim-up concrete bar stools. And there’s another bar outside the pool, and another in the basement.
The New American Home’s rooftop bristles with photovoltaic panels that, the builders claim, completely make up for the 4200 kilowatt-hours a year in electricity to power its abundant lights and gadgets. But while the electricity is offset, the energy consumed by the house is not. The bulk of an estimated $2500 annual total utility cost would come from the natural gas used to heat and cool the house, heat the water and fire up those fireplaces. In its defense, the house cools itself using 39 percent as much fuel as a comparably sized structure, but using a rough Las Vegas average of $7 per million btuin natural gas (the national average is $4.90), we estimate that this house consumes close to 300 million Btu in gas per year. At 293 kwh-per-million Btu, that’s getting up past 85,000 kwh per year—three times the average American home’s 27,022 annual kwh. Put simply, this house is bloated.
The wealthy, environmentally attuned family that presumably would move in could save far more energy by moving to a 3000 sq-ft. house—even one without all the solar panels.
This model home, then, is not a model for sustainable living. And that’s not the only thing that feels out of joint here. The expansive house, like the Builders’ Show’s move to Las Vegas from Florida, was planned before the real estate bust. This city’s famous building boom has been replaced by a foreclosure era, with cranes abandoned at casino construction sites and building permit applications drying up faster than Lake Mead. This extravagant green showpiece seems unlikely to have many imitators in the current economic climate. For those who care about sustainability, that may be a good thing.
